social

Summary: Some transit providers do a decent job of sharing real-time information via social media. We have integrated the best of them into our premium service.

Our approach: Clever Commute uses their data in our service for your benefit. We do not share any of your personal information with others. Users of The Inside Track service can now view this information in its own “window” via our mobile solution. We show you:

If you ride NJ Transit trains from NY Penn Station, then check out our new offering which tweets your track number. This is very cool because tweets are fast and simple…and it gives you newfound control over the delivery of your data. When you “follow” the track announcements for your line, you can even tell Twitter to send them to you as text messages!

Other great news: separately from the “track number” tweets, we also deliver the general Clever alerts via Twitter. So, instead of your getting “alerts” in your inbox, you can get those as tweets as well. You can read all about that at http://www.clevercommute.com/twitter

As the size of our community surpasses the 20,000 commuter mark, it’s time to think about new and innovative ways to thrill and retain the only true asset we have: the commuters.

It probably comes as no surprise that we are crowdsourcing it…with help from an innovative company called GetSatisfaction.com

What is Get Satisfaction (2 minute YouTube video). Didn’t watch that? Well here is what you need to know: GetSatisfaction is a 3rd party website which tracks and manages the questions and answers from the community. Instead of writing to someone at Clever Commute…and waiting…the GetSatisfaction technology guides you to the answer.

Clever Commute technology is solid and the commuters are proactive and helpful. But…”stuff” comes up…and we need a scalable way to address it. For example:

Commuters may have question about their subscription (sign-up, change address, pausing “Clever Commute” while on vacation, etc)

Our business partners have questions about their data feeds

Sponsors may be looking for our media kit for advertisers

The media may want to reach us for a quote or interview

So, please check it out the next time you have an issue or a question.

Set permissions at the group level so that Red people have one experience when visiting your page…and Green people another.

For example:

People in the Green group can see everything that I make public to Facebook

People in the Red group can see virtually nothing about me

Yellow? As you can imagine, that is “inbetween”

TooYoungForFacebook can see everything…except my status updates

Here are the steps:

1. Categorize your friends into groups

Facebook.com => Account => Edit Friends

Click on Create a List

A box will pop up which asks you to name the list…and then add people to it

Click on Create New List

2. Set the permissions

Facebook.com => Account=> Privacy Settings

Customize Settings

For each entry on that page, click on Edit Settings…and then select Custom

From there, the key is the Hide this from tool.(When you start to type the name of a group…Facebook auto-completes it for you)

For example: My Religious and political views can be seen by Friends (not Friends of Friends) plus my network. However, if you are Red or Yellow…you can’t see it

Yes…this one-time set-up takes a while…and if you have hundreds of friends, it may be too late for you to do this. But, once it’s in place…it’s actually very liberating.

In closing

When you accept a new friend request, Facebook will automatically ask you what group you want to put them in, so that’s cool.

You may need to periodically “sweep through” your groups to be sure that members are appropriately classified (relationships change over time, right?)

You need to be a steward of your own data: There is nothing in Facebook which prevents people from being in two groups (or no groups) .

Finally: there is a very cool feature on that page (Choose Your Privacy Settings => Customize settings): the ability to Preview My Profile. It enables you to Preview how your profile appears to a specific person.

GetSatisfaction is a 3rd party website which tracks and manages the questions and answers from the community.Instead of writing to someone at Clever Commute…and waiting…the GetSatisfaction technology guides you to the answer.

We will update this page as move forward with the roll-out…but we did want to put this here as a placeholder.

As you can imagine, sometimes, the answer is it depends. So, in the spirit of crowdsourcing, we are pleased to announce a great new feature: Rate this message. How it works:

At the bottom of every commuter-generated message you get, there will be a new section, as follows:

Was this message helpful?YesNo Report abuse

The blue text above are links. When commuter clicks on their choice, they are taken to a web page which thanks them for casting their vote. That’s it!

A few things to note:

Our database records the rankings…and our program safeguards against multiple votes on a given message by the same person.

Regarding that last category: sometimes, Clever Commuters break the rules…and we then need to remind them of our Rules of the Road. Even more rare is the situation where true spam (from a non-Clever person) slips through. It’s a huge help if the commuters can help us identify that, too.

As you can imagine, this lays the groundwork for several new features:
1. We can give feedback and coaching to post-ers who are consistently rated “low”
2. We can reward post-ers who are rated “high”
3. We can explore new features like “ALWAYS send me updates from this person” and “NEVER send me updates from that person”
4. Automate the process for handling spam and abusive mails
5. …what else? I’m sure there is more

“Step 1″ was just to get the framework in place. This is “version 1.0″…so I’m sure there are ways to improve it…so send me your feedback.

Clever Commute was originally designed for use on a true mobile e-mail device (e.g., Blackberry, iPhone)…not a cell phone.
We previously did a work-around by sending e-mail to your phone (e.g., 9735551212@vtext.com)
But now that Twitter is here…we have a new and better way:

So…here is what you should do if you want to improve your experience with Clever Commute.

Put plainly: Clever Commute is leveraging existing Twitter infrastructure in order to allow for new ways for people like you to follow the updates from commuters on their line.
So what remains in order to get you up-and-running? For example, in order to follow someone whose Twitter name is crandcrand

Login to Twitter…and then enter this address: http://www.twitter.com/crandcrand

Click on the Follow button near the top of the page

Now that you are following the member you want to follow, you may want to

The idea that I am thinking about is very straight-forward…and does not take advantage of all that Twitter has to offer…but it would be a very functional start:
In-scope commuter lines will have a Twitter “account” that will tweet the Clever Commuter alerts. SMS users may the use the “follow via SMS” feature…and therefore receive the alerts via their cell phones. People who chose to follow. (AND get SMS updates on their cell phones) would receive the 140 character updates…which come from their fellow commuters. The messages are designed to be very “clean” and free of ads, promotional messages, footers, signatures, etc.
Our recently-released tech upgrade gives us this flexibility and we are exploring a “beta” soon.

Why is this appealing to Clever Commute? it’s adds value to the product…at zero cost…and no impact to non-users

It provides a way for us to provide fast and free service for commuters who use their cell phones.Â (FYI – sending true SMS would otherwise cost us money. Our legacy of sending email to your phone has a few flaws…which are largely address by this new approach.

There would be no impact or changes to experience of the other Clever Commuters (e.g., Blackberry, iPhone)

Twitter can handle the volume

It’s key to note that Twitter solves for a key problem I have: the current Clever Commute “user experience” on a cell phone is “just OK”. (signup is tough…and now that we have sponsored messages and footers, the actual messages are too long)
We’d also add that Twitter is good for today…but we could also “swap it out” and / or publish to other social media (Facebook, Friendfeed…etc.)

It’s a new world…and we’re excited about it
For now, this will be a beta program…and we’ll evaluate the impact after a few months and then determine if we’ll continue.

For people who chose not to use Twitter, absolutely nothing will change…so this will be a non-event for them.